Community Impact Through Entrepreneurship

Every business has opportunities for redemptive impact. Your business does not have to be a non-profit or charity to help people with their physical and spiritual needs. Lamon Luther of Atlanta, Georgia, is a furniture company. Making wooden furniture may not seem to be a “high calling,” but Lamon Luther believes all vocations have value. Brian Preston, the owner of the company, took this principle to the local homeless community, and began helping the vocationless. By offering jobs to those who no one else would, he brought redemptive impact into his otherwise secular business.

The housing crisis of 2007 had left an unusually high amount of construction workers and carpenters jobless. For some, joblessness also meant homelessness in the troubled economic times. Preston was a carpenter by hobby, but upon discovering a large community of homeless individuals living in the woods together, he began to feel called toward making his passion his full-time job. He hired some of the carpenters he had met in the woods, and from there his business grew. Lamon Luther is now an Atlanta staple and even has furniture in the stadium of the Atlanta Falcons.

It is easy to look at certain jobs and dismiss the possibility of doing that job as a ministry. Certain vocations seem more “holy” than others, and this perception prevents good from being done where there are opportunities. Dividing the world into ministry jobs and non-ministry jobs completely misses the point that Christianity is a walk of life and not just something one does in explicity religious contexts. Like Brian Preston and Lamon Luther, Christians should lean into every opportunity they have to make a positive impact in people’s lives. Everything the Christian does should be done for the glory of God